lifwanian said
They have great resale values and will always find a buyer.

That’s definitely something I like about macs – being able to sell it again for still a good portion of the price say 5 years down the road I got mine two years ago for roughly 1100€, and the same model still sells on second-hand sites for €900.

Mactracker (for those times you need more info about your Mac or just want to check out all models ever made)

Microsoft Office (entire package)

iLife (entire package)

Dropbox (yeah, we all know about it)

CloudApp (as dropbox but better for screenshots)

Caffeine (keep your Mac from going to sleep)

The Unarchiver (for RAR and ZIP files, still got a built in one but this is faster)

VLC (just had to put in there)

Spotify (if you like music)

uTorrent (if you’re into those sort of things)

Photoshop (of course)

These are the one’s I have installed for the moment and I’ve never had any problems with either one of them and they have worked perfectly for me all the time.

Good luck and have fun

EDIT : Sorry for not providing any links but the forum seems to have bugged out for me so I can’t copy/paste for some reason (work flawless on other sites though so don’t know what’s up) and to write the links by hand is way to time consuming

My comments are a little late (and now moot), but I’ll say it anyway. First some facts:

Despite fanboisms, both OSs are targets for malware, and both OSs can become infected by it. OSX is no more secure than Windows, and vice versa. In fact, one can only argue that OSX is more secure based upon the sheer amount of malware targeting Windows systems. The user is the primary cause of infection for both OSs. Regardless of OS, your computer’s security rests on your shoulders.

Both OSX and Windows computers run on x86-based hardware. There is no computational advantage one has over the other.

The big software packages (Photoshop, Flash, etc) are largely the same between the OSs. With the same computational power, and the same software, you will not see much difference in how your favorite applications perform.

If your purchase decision is based solely on security, computational power, or major-vendor software performance, then you’re wasting money if you choose Mac.

Buy a Mac if:

you like the software available for OSX that isn’t available for Windows

you want to develop web apps using Ruby or Python (better tools)

you like OSX

The latter is, of course, subjective, and you won’t know you like OSX until you use it.

Despite fanboisms, both OSs are targets for malware, and both OSs can become infected by it. OSX is no more secure than Windows, and vice versa. In fact, one can only argue that OSX is more secure based upon the sheer amount of malware targeting Windows systems. The user is the primary cause of infection for both OSs. Regardless of OS, your computer’s security rests on your shoulders.

That’s not a fact. I agree that the main vulnerability is the user, but OSX is inheritly more secure than Windows based on its heritige from the unix world. The unix core is prided for its great permission system that Windows simply cannot match with all its registry writing abilities that it randomly hands out to whoever asks. It’s not something Apple did so great, it’s just something Microsoft did wrong.

Sure, there’s malware for both. OSX is definitely not invulnerable and we’ll have to see if there’ll be an increase now that Macs are becoming ever more comon, point taken. But I disagree with the suggestion that it’s an equal playing field.